A Little Attitude

I like circles. I prefer circles to squares. I can’t say why. It’s a geometric emotion. I like circles because they’re simple. And because they can be pies and wheels and faces and plates. Squares are a matter of real estate. Squares squire the commercialization of space. And that’s not good. Circles are the face of spheres. Spheres are the ultimate fulfillment of the circle. Spheres have body and volume. The fur of the sphere is the fire of the sun. Newspapers are square and sour as sauerkraut. Nobody likes the news and yet we all hunger for it. This is why the news is square. When news becomes circular it ceases to be news. It becomes ovulation. It gets to be eggs. Eggs are the news of the new as the lapel of a coat may be pinched by a tailor. Magazines are square. Buildings are square. Chess boards are square. Squares have four equal sides and four equal angles. The rectangle is not precisely a square but it has four right angles the same as a square. I think of the rectangle as an elongated square. The parallelogram, on the other hand, is a quadrilateral with two pairs of parallel sides. How does that make you feel? It makes me feel parallel. Parallel to a parallel. Which is to say side by side with a refuge and a thaw. The refuge is made of letters and the thaw is the softening of structure. These are parallel circumstances. Language disguises things. But if you look closely you can see that the refuge of a fiction leads to a softening of the attitude. Attitude is orientation in space. In mathematics, space is a set, sometimes called a universe. I don’t know what the universe is. But I’m certain it’s not a square.